I had a thought for a site I may make in the future when I have a bit more money to invest. The main problem would be that I would need to get the same permissions to use videos that netflix was originally able to get. Say, for example, if I was trying to start off netflix. How would I (being a little nobody), get the rights to use all of those videos? I'm sure I would have too make a bunch of deals with the owners of the content. How would I go about doing that? I think I have a really good idea, i just don't have much money to do it yet.

I don't own Netflix but I'm pretty sure they buy rights from networks and companies. For example they would contact CBS and buy rights from them and then they would be able to have "How I Met Your Mother" and other shows under their network and so on. I'm not 100% sure, all I can say is you're going to need a lot of money to buy rights

Alright fine, then screw the netflix example. How would a person go about getting permission to stream the movies that are on netflix, if they were able to pay whoever owned said movie a small amount of money ($0.40-$1) for every single time it was streamed? (assuming that they did not have the $$$$$ to just pay for permission to stream the movies for a certain amount of time.)

a) You go and make a deal with the vendor. If your offer is good and he is interested, you are both happy. Obviously, you would need to be able to showcase your previous business success to persuade them that meeting with you isn't a waste of time. You will probably need to pay some people to get the introductions.

b) You raise capital. You find people to invest on your business and then doing (a) is going to be much easier.

c) You already know the right people and talking to them is just a phone call away.

I would give up on the idea to be honest. Not trying to be harsh and it's great you've got the drive and ideas to make something happen, but you'd be better off spending your energy on a different project.

It costs millions to acquire the rights to well known media content, then that only gets you rights to one region. Then you have to gamble it will be popular etc or it's dead money. So acquiring your own catalogue is next to impossible for content with mass appeal.

Then services like BlinkBox in the UK operate the other model ie pay per view netflix in effect - they are owned by Tesco and needed millions to begin.

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